As with all such cases, especially when the American legal system is involved, it is impossible to be sure of the exact truth. But Allen came out of the affair appallingly. His massive self-indulgence and weird, almost autistic detachment were plain to see. One judge described him as "the most opaque of narcissists". In the time allowed in the Gritti Palace, it is futile attempting to get into the details of this affair. Allen simply says he is now very happy with Soon-Yi — "I must say I lucked out" — that the audiences for his films were unaffected by the scandal, and that he never suffered any backlash on the streets of Manhattan.
"There was no ripple professionally for me at all when I was in the papers with my custody stuff. I made my films, I worked in the streets of New York, I played jazz every Monday night, I put a play on. Everything professionally went just the same. There were no repercussions. There was white-hot interest for a while, like with all things like that, and then it became uninteresting to people."
All of which may be true but the reality is that, ever since, his films have been bouncing from studio to studio — his latest is Fox. Allen seems to interpret this as an extension of his critique of Hollywood. "I can bring stars, I've worked with terrific cameramen, but people still have a better chance of making their $150m films because they're not interested in the kind of profits I can bring if I'm profitable."
In addition, even fans have grown a little queasy at the mention of his name. His central problem, which he does not acknowledge or perhaps understand, is that all his films are so overwhelmingly about Woody Allen that one must be, at least to some extent, sympathetic to the idea of the man if you are to like them at all. After the Farrow/Soon-Yi affair, the wells of sympathy began to run dry. Allen deflects this whole issue by denying his works are autobiographical.
"The sensibility of the film-maker infuses the project so people see a picture like Annie Hall and everyone thinks it's so autobiographical. But I was not from Coney Island, I was not born under a Ferris wheel, my father never worked at a place that had bumper cars, that's not how I met Diane Keaton, and that's not how we broke up. Of course, there's that character who's always beleaguered and harassed. Certain things are autobiographical, certain feelings, even occasionally an incident, but overwhelmingly they're totally made up, completely fabricated."
All of which is to miss the point. The reality is that years ago, in his stand-up days, Allen created a comic persona; the beleaguered and harassed character for whom the world will never quite make sense. The character was transferred to both his early comedies and his later, more sophisticated, films. Indeed, he's still there, unchanged, in his new release, Melinda and Melinda. The Allen character here, Hobie, is played by Will Ferrell but, he admits, he would have played the part if he was 30 years younger. The Allen persona does not appear in every film, but there can be no doubt that this is who his fans mean when they say "Woody Allen".
The Allen persona is not really much different from the man himself. There are fewer gags, the scripting is more chaotic and the overall tone is gloomier but I am never in any doubt that the person in the baroque Venetian room is both "Woody Allen" and Woody Allen. The issue of whether his films are factually autobiographical is, therefore, trivial. Now the point about a stand-up persona is that it is designed to inspire affection or, at least, empathy. Allen has worked triumphantly and continued to do so throughout his films. But after the 1992 debacle, people stopped liking Woody Allen and, inevitably, also stopped liking "Woody Allen". He had laid a trap for himself by being too much himself.
As a result, ever since Bullets over Broadway in 1994, his films have lost much of their cachet. Critics periodically announce a "return to form", but the fact they do so indicates the extent of the problem. Melinda and Melinda will do nothing to reverse the trend. Glib and vacuous, it sets up a tragic story and a comic story from the same initial plot point and then concludes it doesn't matter either way because, in the end, everybody's dead. As entertainment it's dire; as art it doesn't make first base. Allen, of course, rejects this and claims not even to notice any critical or popular decline. "The reception is pretty much the same. There are so many reviews and it's not like a play when if you are dead in New York, you're dead. I've had films that do well in certain cities and not others, or in Europe and not America. My films have been bopping along in the same general pattern for 20 or 25 years. They usually do pretty well in Europe and less well in the US. That's pretty consistent."
My problem is that I never really liked any of his films except Bananas, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex. . . and Sleeper. To me, Woody Allen was always a great comedian, and then a maker of pretentious movies. Occasionally — Crimes and Misdemeanours, Hannah and Her Sisters — these films showed style and real depth. But, in general, after Annie Hall everything seemed to me to be suffocated in self-indulgence,
even when they contained, as they often did, great performances by marvellous actors such as Martin Landau. Mighty Aphrodite and Melinda and Melinda are simply pirouettes in a cul-de-sac.
I find Allen's rejection of Hollywood downright philistine. Kurosawa, Fellini and Bergman are, indeed, great directors, but so are Ford, Hawks, Wilder, Hitchcock, Keaton, Scorsese and many others. Not to know why and how is not to understand cinema. And what about Wong Kar Wai, Tarkovsky and Sokurov? These directors take films way beyond anything Allen can begin to imagine. Until that strange meeting in the Gritti Palace, I had never really paid attention, never analysed my objection to his work. Now, however, I understand. Allen is right about himself. His fixation on death is the heart of the matter.
He was so stunned by the discovery he must die that it has turned him into the opaque narcissist of the custody hearings. All that mattered to him was his life, his feelings.
But this is infantile. Grown-ups learn to understand their debts to the dead and to the unborn, they learn their own death is a pretty small matter. If they are gifted, they make art out of these higher insights; geniuses make great art. Allen just froze at the age of five. I asked a friend, a former fan, what he would say to Allen today. "Grow up," he said. Exactly.
Laughing no longer, I left that deathly seance, the view of the Salute, the Grand Canal and glossy, coffin-like gondolas, and went that night to the Teatro Malibran where Woody Allen was to perform with his New Orleans jazz band.
I watched him for a while, distracting himself with his clarinet, and left at the interval.
